More potentially good news for sufferers of Parkinson's disease. After yesterday's announcement of successful studies for Phytopharm's Cogane treatment, comes a positive update from Oxford BioMedica.

The gene therapy company said new Phase 2 data showed patients showed improvement after receiving a second dose of its ProSavin treatment. The company said after this six month assessment there was now the opportunity to try a higher dose which could be even more effective. Meanwhile a research paper on ProSavin published yesterday in the Science Translational Medicine journal also suggested positive results from the treatment.

Much like Phytopharm yesterday, the news has lifted Oxford's shares and they are now 9p higher at 19.75p. KBC Peel Hunt issued a buy note with a 17p price target (since overtaken by the market's enthusiasm) and said:

This [data] puts the product in line with the leading gene therapy treatments in development. The therapy is potentially complementary to oral products such as Phytopharm's Cogane.

We expect a higher dose of Prosavin to be trialled shortly, with a larger number of patients before the start of Phase II/III trials. Focus is now on securing commercial partners for [cancer vaccine] Trovax and Prosavin, and time lines are uncertain.

Meanwhile Panmure Gordon commented:

The headline ProSavin data from a second cohort allows us to upgrade the stock from hold to buy and reset our price target from 12p to 17p based on including the project into our sum of the parts valuation on a 10% probability applied to our net present value calculation of 50p for the project.

We acknowledge the limitation of this trial, namely a small sample size, open-label trial and the change to mode of administration for the third cohort introduces execution risk but this project represents a significant step-change in technology. ProSavin is not simply a better mouse trap in the treatment of Parkinson's disease. To continue the mouse trap analogy, ProSavin represents a different way of catching mice.

We continue to closely monitor the progress of ProSavin and are encouraged by both the initial signs of efficacy and the safety profile to date. ProSavin has now progressed to evaluate ProSavin at higher dose using a new administration method in a third cohort. The change to administration and due to the fact that too few patients have been dosed and that the data is without control to compare against, we will only handicap the project as 10% probability in our sum of the parts target.

Parkinson's disease is notorious for having patients that have spontaneous and non-treatment related bounce, which may in fact have been caused by better standard of care having the patients looked at in hospital by some of the world's greatest neurologists.

Phytopharm, by the way, has seen its shares climb another 5.25p to 32p after yesterday's 300% leap.